American Wars, American Peace: Notes from a Son of the Empire

Swindled by Saint Jack

Swindled by Saint Jack “The country made a terrible mistake last night.” Thus I recall myself intoning, in some callow attempt at portentousness, to a jubilant high school classmate I still remember as the only person of my acquaintance in Adams County, Pennsylvania, to have identified himself as a supporter of John Kennedy in his 1960 presidential race against Richard Nixon. Even though we were all several years shy of the pre-Vietnam voting age—twenty-one—throughout the campaign we treated the guy as something between a weirdo and a pariah. On Election Day the rest of us were utterly shocked and astonished. Of course we all liked Ike: he and Mamie lived in Adams County. Of course we were all Eisenhower 128 Republicans: many of our families, English, Scotch-Irish, German, descended from the old farmer and merchant stock of the region, had been Lincoln Republicans. I had additional reasons. The president went to our church, where I often saw him on Sundays. I lifeguarded his grandchildren at the country club pool. On a drizzly day with no swimmers I had once even shagged golf balls for him. In the 1960 election, if Ike said Nixon was the one, Nixon was certainly the one for me. Within two years, away at college in North Carolina, I was an unreconstructed Kennedy-ite. I would have been one whether I’d been in Michigan or New York or California. Of politics I knew little more than what I learned in high school. What I did know was that the man had some kind of style; and whatever it was, it was the kind of style that made him the kind of American man I wanted to be. From Election Day onward he had knocked everyone out with his humor, intelligence, his sheer vibrant energy and adventure with which he seemed to approach every experience. Within a week of voting day it seemed almost raffishly enjoyable that he had edged out Nixon only after his old man had gotten the Daley Machine to deliver Chicago. Ill-gotten or not, suddenly even the hairbreadth margin of victory seemed a positive thing. How long could you dwell on the threat of old-time political corruption in a person who, upon hearing a member of his administration described as “coruscatingly” intelligent, was said to have responded, “50,000 votes the other way and we’d all be coruscatingly stupid.” Then came the dazzling inaugural address. Barely a paragraph in we heard him saying , “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans— born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” And then, without taking a beat, there was more: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” SWINDLED BY SAINT JACK 129 At the time, it seems not to have occurred to anybody of my generation that, as was rhetorically and historically the case, Kennedy was referring, quite directly and specifically, to his generation—the younger, junior-officer generation of World War II, as opposed to the tired old generation of the generals such as Eisenhower—and not our own. We simply assumed he was talking about us, and so we took the challenge as our own. Then, at the end, he hammered us again: “And so, my fellow Americans,” he said, “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” (He went on to make a similar appeal to “fellow citizens of the world,” proposing that they “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”—a quotation that deserves at least as much to be remembered.) Any way we looked at this, we can perhaps see now that behind the scrim of faux-Churchillian rhetoric that passed for eloquence at the time, Kennedy...